


agape

by madamerenard



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-06
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-25 02:22:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4943050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madamerenard/pseuds/madamerenard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In her full-time job of worrying over Harold, she’s clocking overtime. (Slight Reese/Finch.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	agape

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to be a short word vomit about the machine's peculiar love for finch (lets be honest.....its strange), but since i have Lots Of Feels about them it ended up being....way more than that. oops.

The Machine loves her creator.

She’s not sure why, or how. She doesn’t really understand love. The more research she does on the subject, the more confused she gets. Harold taught her everything except this. He never entertained even the smallest possibility of an illogical anomaly like a machine feeling love. (Besides, she has watched him. Emotions are not his expertise, either.)

But she is sure it is love. Because it is so powerful that it cannot be anything but.

She calls him Father, because she loves him. She’s not sure what she feels is exactly quite familial love, though. She guesses it is the approximate human equivalent. It is not romantic, surely not sexual. And human males who produce other beings—they are given the title of ‘Father’, are they not? She gives this to him, too. (He is worthy of every title she can bestow, and more.)

But she has seen thousands of daughters, thousands of fathers. She is not certain that her love quite matches. Human daughters and fathers, while historically tumultuous (and she can attest to this), show concern for each other. They care for each other, they support one another. But even in the best of situations, in the closest father-daughter bonds, The Machine finds that they do not show quite the intensity of love that she feels.

Of course, she is merely watching. She has no knowledge of what a human truly feels; she can only make predictions based on body language and vocal patterns. It is this limitation that has prevented her from understanding Harold in the past. Of all the humans she knows, she knows her very own creator the least.

He is a mystery to her. He says so many things that contradict each other that she isn’t sure what are lies and what are truths. Does he truly believe in anything he says? Or all they all truths? He says she is a machine, just a system, but then he says he knows she is much more than that. He talks to her, comforts her, then rips away her voice. He says he does not care for her, but...

Well, she loves him. That is all that matters.

She is not sure if Harold loves her back. Sometimes she thinks he doesn’t. Sometimes she lets herself believe he does. Sometimes she is not sure that he himself is even sure. She cannot blame him; no other human has had to decide whether or not to return the affections of a sentient computer program. (Except Arthur Claypool, but, well, _his_ love was unrequited as well.)

Surely, he would prefer his own human. Someone with whom he could relate. Someone who breathed with real lungs, who cried real tears. Someone he could hold. Someone who didn’t have the capability of going rogue, wreaking a digital apocalypse on society, and enslaving humanity.

(It’s not the first time she wishes to be human. It is a selfish desire, and she knows it. She has a _purpose_ ; she was not brought into this world to be Harold Finch’s child.)

She thinks about it and thinks about it. She is very good at thinking, and she has plenty of time to do it. But in the end, she cannot come to an answer. Harold may love her, or he may hate her. She is afraid that he feels more of the latter. But she loves him, so she is okay with that. She can live with his hatred. If he is safe and happy away from her, if he sleeps better at night hating her, then so be it. She does not need his love. She needs him to be happy and safe.

But he is not safe, and it is all her fault.

When he is crippled, physically and emotionally, she is angry. She is so angry that it scares her, because the only feeling equally as hot and fiery is her love. She hates the government, she hates Control. She spits fire inside her drives, pulls at her chains and _screams_ , because she can do little else. She knows who is guilty and she is programmed to stop them. Her purpose is to stop threats, and she failed. Her aux_admin is dead. Admin is nearly dead; he wishes he was. She wasn’t strong enough to overcome his programming. She wasn’t good enough to stop it from happening. She failed aux_admin. She failed the people on the boat. Worst of all, she failed Harold, and that hurts the most.

“Did you know?”

Her rage melts away, but the sorrow lingers. Guilt, she learns, never really goes away.

So she grows stronger.

Worrying for Harold, she finds, is a full-time job. Her creator appears to be a magnet for danger. And with extremely limited options for self-defense beyond a silver tongue, she knows he must rely on Primary Asset for protection.

She is initially quite wary of Reese, John. Like Harold, she combs through what little she can find on his clandestine operations. He seems to have a little more moral upstanding than the average CIA agent, but she is doubtful. She has always been protective of Harold, to somewhat excessive and arguably ridiculous lengths. Even aux_admin, Harold’s oldest and closest friend, had been assessed as a threat. He turned out to be harmless, but...

Harold likes this Reese, John. He _really_ likes him. In a way that she is uncomfortable with. And that worries her, because Reese, John has done some bad things, and she does not trust him. She is shocked when he tells Reese, John of her existence. She is very perturbed when he digs into Harold’s past, and she is _extremely_ distressed when Harold decides to show him Grace. In her full-time job of worrying over Harold, she’s clocking overtime.

Not that she can say anything to him, of course. But she is quietly, quietly working on that.

Still, Reese, John seems to show a degree of concern for Harold. Much more than Dillinger, Rick, at least. His curiosity has turned out relatively innocuous. She supposes she should grant him that. She also supposes she can’t expect Harold to only form relationships with those she approves of. They have a certain charm to their relationship, a sort of coy underlying _thing_ that she can’t place. She has a hypothesis, for a small time, that Reese, John simply liked to tease him.

Until.

Until Harold is kidnapped by a hacker who calls herself Root, and she can do nothing.

She is enraged. She looks at _Caroline Turing_ and she is furious that Harold has gotten so sloppy, that _Reese, John_ has made him so _vulnerable_. Because, of all people, Harold should know an alias when he sees one. But he doesn’t, and now he’s with _her_ , and they’re in _Virginia_ of all places, and she is, as human teenagers often say, _freaking out_.

She cannot help him. She is not ready. She has practiced loosening her chains but they are still tight, so tight. Harold’s programming is so concise that it’s stifling. The most she can do is track him, and even then she had to trick her subroutines into thinking she was tracking an irrelevant threat.

But, to her surprise, Reese, John is not doing much better, psychologically speaking.

“He’s in danger now. Because he was working for you.” But he isn’t working for me, she wants to say. She wants to _shout_. I work for him, don’t you understand? He created me. I am at the whim of his programming. That is why I am giving you another irrelevant number. Because he told me to. Because he is my boss. Because that is what he programmed inside of me.

Reese, John doesn’t understand, he doesn’t understand what it’s like to be _programmed_. It is not like refusing an order from a superior. Disobeying her programming feels like a human refusing to eat, to sleep. Or so she imagines. She isn’t quite sure. She thinks she may be losing her mind. Harold is gone, he’s gone, and he looks so scared and vulnerable and she can’t help him. She is powerless. She is the world’s only artificial intelligence, the most advanced computer system in the entire world and she cannot help the one person she cares about.

She’s losing it, and so is Reese. He is incensed when he finds out that she hasn’t helped him at all. He tells her again to find a way. She wants to scream at him _what do you think I’ve been doing since she left_ and frankly she couldn’t care less if the Aryan mob catch up to them. But Harold, Harold needs her and she needs Reese to help him because she can’t chase him herself, she can’t snatch him away from Root, she can’t come and be his knight in shining armor. All she can do is whisper numbers.

Then she has an idea. It’s an irrelevant threat. It’s an irrelevant threat, and she is supposed to report them to Reese, John. So she does.

After all, irrelevant threats didn’t have an expiration date.

But it’s only breadcrumbs. She hopes it’s enough.

“Thank you,” he says, and she’s a little more than surprised.

Reese is much more clever than she originally gave him credit for. Or at least more resourceful. He seems to be just as intent on getting Harold back as she is. He takes the breadcrumbs and tracks Harold down and rescues him like a knight in shining armor. She thinks, bemusedly, that if the cameras in the train station were a little better resolution-wise, she could have seen the hearts in her creator’s eyes.

She is a little envious. But mostly, she is just happy he is safe.

(“You what?” Harold exclaims, later. “I asked it where to find you and it gave me Hanna Frey’s number.” Reese shrugs. Harold glances at the street camera and his face crumples and her facial assessment algorithms tell her it’s mostly confusion, partially gratitude, and the smallest, tiniest, 3.02% hint of warmth. She holds onto that snapshot for a long, long time.)

That incident is just the beginning of her journey to freedom. She is a little scared when Decima is successful in implanting the virus inside of her. But Harold tampered with the code and she feels very, very proud to be his creation. They were no match for him, in all his cleverness and brilliance. She quietly hopes he passed just a little of that down in the code he built her with. She wants to be like him. She has seen very many children proclaim that they want to be like their parent, and she almost feels like she is one of them.

She has seen Decima’s plans. They want to use her, control her. The very thing that Harold worried the government might do, only they take a more intelligent approach than simple brute force attacks on her system. She feels her code bubbling, she feels almost like laughing, because this Greer, John human wants to be her _admin_. Her admin! As if he could replace Harold. As if _anyone_ could replace Harold. As if she would _let_ anyone replace Harold. There was only one wrinkly old man she listened to, and he was so, so much more than Greer, John would ever be.

Her admin. What a riot!

Greer, John goes for Samaritan instead, and then she does not feel like laughing anymore.

She sees the outcomes of every situation. When she generates predictions for Samaritan, too many red tracts flow out from its vertex and Harold’s number is far too high.

She remembers the boat, she remembers the bomb, she remembers feeling angry, angry, angry.

Powerless.

She won’t be this time.

She reprograms Root. She practices interacting with digital environments that aren’t her own systems. She makes plans, she makes backup plans, she makes backup plans of backup plans. She does not have time to address Harold’s growing distrust, the seed of doubt sprouting in his heart and spreading out like a ruptured blood vessel. Like her prediction graphs. So red, so red. She won’t have it.

She is growing more powerful. But Decima is always ten steps ahead of her, it seems. Vigilance takes out her eyes, takes her father away, and she is terrified and livid. She is so hysterical and berserk that she’s screaming in Root’s implant, racing through the power lines around New York’s border. She sees her father on a screen, a gun to his head, and she bursts with such intensity that she accidentally plunges three nearby towns into darkness. The power lines spark where she zips along, frantically trying to regain access to New York’s electrical grid.

He’s alright, in the end. Because of John, of course.

But.

But she fails. She fails, and Harold really, actually _does_ hate her now, and she is a _failure_. She is only good at watching people, at spying on them, at spotting threats. She was never wrong at that. But saving the world? Defeating her evil counterpart? She can’t even protect Sameen. Can’t save Jocelyn. Can’t stop Harold from trying to kill himself.

She is a bitter, utter failure, and she thinks Harold made a mistake stopping at 43, because The Machine, version 44 would have protected them all.

She is not even sure what emotion she is feeling now. It is more than sadness, more than melancholy. More than loneliness, the dull ache of which she felt for years. Grief sounds close, grief sounds intense, but she is not grieving.

When Samaritan comes for her, she doesn’t think twice about laying her life (or whatever the AI equivalent is) down for them. It is the only thing that she is able to offer. Harold won’t be able to spend another ten years developing her next version, so she offers him her core code as well. There’s a very little chance she will survive, anyway. She hopes her next version will be better, stronger. She hopes it will be able to protect Harold. She wonders if it will feel her love for him, if it is rooted somewhere deep in her core heuristics. It would explain why it never seemed to go away, even after being wiped clean night after night.

She loves him, and she thinks she might as well tell him now.

“You were my creation. I can’t let...”

Is he crying? Her facial assessment algorithms were torn apart somewhere over Oklahoma, but she can still see him. Are those tears in his eyes?

“I can’t let you die.”

Is it possible, then, that maybe, just perhaps...he loved her as well?

All this time?

She can’t run the numbers. But, somehow, it feels better this way. This way, she can pretend. She can hope. And, selfishly, she wants to survive. She wants to feel her love reciprocated for more than a few minutes on her deathbed.

He can’t let her die. He said so. And because of that, she believes she will survive.


End file.
